Pinterest Now Owns Instapaper – New Features on the Way

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Pinterest now owns Instapaper, a bookmarking service previously owned by Marco Arment and Betaworks. The photo sharing social network announced that it will acquire the Instapaper team and work on updating the service and improving the whole Pinterest experience along with it.

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Instapaper was introduced back in 2007 as a simple web service with a Read Later bookmarklet. The service allowed individuals to save articles for later reading on a different device – smartphone, tablet, or e-reader. Instapaper was founded by Web developer Marco Arment. In 2013, Arment sold majority stake to startup studio and venture capital company Betaworks. This led to a redesigned web interface.

Instapaper was one of the first services to offer the ability to save content for later. It became one of the most popular apps for iPhone. In late 2011, the service has about 2 million users.

Instapaper recently managed to catch Pinterest’s eye and the photo sharing company shook hands with Betaworks on the deal. Instapaper excitingly announced the news on their blog.

“In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product,” says Instapaper team.

Instapaper says that joining Pinterest will provide them with plenty of other resources to achieve the mission they’ve set on years back, but on a whole different scale. The service’s expertise and technology will also be used for some particular Rich Pin types.

Instapaper ensures nothing will change for its users and customers. The team will set sail from Betawork’s New York and head over to San Francisco, where Pinterest is headquartered.

Because Pinterest now owns Instapaper, there will be some big changes in store. Instapaper has announced that Instaparser, the service’s developer product, will cease to function. All signups have now been closed and the billing for existing customers has been halted. Instaparser will still be running until November 1 in order to provide users with a smooth transition.

The move will surely benefit Pinterest because the more expertise it brings to the existing team, the more it can improve its products. New ideas might change the Pinterest experience and bring fresh features to the table.